HELLO

Welcome to our page. Take a little time to have look around our site and get to know us. We are available for bookings, just drop us an email at therachelhamerband@hotmail.co.uk and we will get back to you.

Thank you for visiting, check back soon for updates.

The Rachel Hamer Band x

After a brilliant start to the year launching the Album we have had some amazing reviews of the album.

We have a few things in the pipeline for next year so check back for updates. If you would like us at a club, venue or festival near you get in touch we would love to know!

Love,

RHB x

FIRST REVIEWS ARE IN!!!"A beautifully entrancing Folk album, one that captures the sense of loss of those who have been forgotten by great swathes of the country, Hard Ground is there to be dug." Ian.D.Hall,Liverpool Sound and Vision

"Hard Ground is an exceptional debut album by anybody’s standards and I predict a great future for The Rachel Hamer Band" ,Dai Jeffries,Folking.com

We have had our first two reviews in of our Debut Album Hard Ground and we are extremely pleased! Thank you for the reviews Folking.comand Liverpool Sound and Vision!

NEWS

We are very excited to announce that our Debut Album Hard Ground will be released on the 22nd of February with a Launch at Cecil Sharp House and a Newcastle Launch at Gosforth Civic Theatre on the 23rd of February. We are looking forward to sharing the Album with you all!

You can pre-order the album on our website for £12 which includes a download of the album and P&P CD's will be shipped after the 23rd of February. To pre-or...der go to :http://www.therachelhamerband.com/music

We are thrilled to announced that we are the recipient of the Graeme Miles Bursary 2016. We will be using the bursary to pay for recording time of our debut album.We are also delighted to announce that we are joining The Unthanks, The Wilsons, The Young’uns, Martyn Wyndham-Read, The Keelers, Mike Nicholson and Robin Dale at the Graeme Miles celebration concerts at Middlesbrough Town Hall on February 12 and at Band on the Wall in Manchester on February 13!

More info at :http://www.efdss.org/news/200-january-2016/3375-graeme-miles-bursary-2016-recipient-announced

RHBx

Review of our second EP is out.. and it is great! The review comes from David Kidman from Fatea and we are very proud to share it with you!

The Newcastle-based Rachel Hamer Band (comprising Rachel herself, Saltburn fiddler/clog-dancer Grace Smith, Teesside guitarist Graeme Armstrong and Glossop multi-instrumentalist Sam Partridge), is one of those highly enviable performing units that seems to have arrived on the scene fully formed, thoroughly assured and confident with a well-defined musical identity and keen sense of presence and purpose. Unbelievably, this four-piece only got together a year or so ago, yet has already made a healthy mark on its native north-east.

Its formidable presence is communicated in the group photo that adorns this debut EP: bold and clear-sighted in attitude, these guys mean business, but at the same time there's a sense of skilled balance in the composition that well reflects the musical contents too. The internal dynamics of the lineup (at its most basic fiddle, whistle, guitar and voice) are well construed, and arguably even more persuasive when propelled with a guest rhythm section, as on three out of the four tracks here, notably the busy, bouncy opening item The Witchfinder General, which intermingles the Causton/Sheppard original song with an animated reel composed by Grace and almost incidentally features some adept vocal interplay along the way between the gorgeously-voiced Rachel herself and her male and female colleagues.

The band then turns in a deliciously Celtic-tinged drifting treatment of the traditional Her Bright Smile (Haunts Me Still) - which well demonstrates the virtue of rest within a song structure while keeping things moving. Individual instrumental lines are employed sparingly on the ballad William And Mary, whereas the EP's concluding track, Lonely Waterloo, is arguably the pick of the bunch, on which Rachel's cannily phrased singing comes into its own against a brooding drone backdrop. Rachel and her band have produced a mightily impressive calling-card here, although I can't altogether escape a slight aftertaste of "is it all just a touch too accomplished to be true?" (the challenge will now be for time to prove me wrong!).